Carl Hutzler’s Blog

Great post on lifehacker.com today on how to deal with the dreaded winmail.dat file attachment that you sometimes get from people.

Also, if you are using Apple’s Mail application (mail.app) make sure to choose “Always send windows friendly attachments” under the EDIT:ATTACHMENTS menu. This way you will always send out standard file formats instead of the apple “double” format which includes both resource and data pieces (forks) which windows users will be unable to process (mostly).

My dad gunned down Ross 6 to 0. Evidently Ross did not like the g-forces that much and became an easy target :-)

From left to right: My Dad, Ross’s Co-pilot/instructor (I don’t recall his name), Ross, and “Smudge” (my Dad’s co-pilot/instructor).

Today I am in Boston attendig the AOTA conference/summit. Basically it is a collection of security and antispam vendors along with a number of big ISPs and big email senders. The main thrust has to do with combating PHISH emails which attempt to defraud consumers by tricking them into visiting websites and giving up personal information like their login or SS#. Since most of the “spam” I get these days is indeed eBay, Paypal, Bank of America, and Citibank scams, I fully understand why this is the big problem today.

I have a number of take-away impressions from the conference, but I think the biggest one is that for the first time, I am finally seeing a maturation of AUTHENTICATION technologies for email. The big two are DKIM and SIDF. A terrific accomplishment is that both of these technologies are seeing fairly widespread adoption by both senders and receivers of email. As more organizations/domains adopt these technologies, it will become easier to tell who the responsible party is for the email that you are reading. And if that email is spam, who to hold responsible.

But AUTHENTICATION is only half of the issue. Even if I know that “you are who you claim you are”, I still don’t know if you are a “good guy”. A good example is looking at someone’s drivers license (an analogy used during one presentation). I might know that your name is John Smith (after comparing your picture to you, etc) but I don’t necessarily know if you are a good driver. Good driving is established after a period of time during which the driver exhibits good driving behavior.

So the next step in the email world is combining AUTHENTICATION with REPUTATION. And the biggest surprise for me after being somewhat out of the industry for 2-3 years, is that REPUTATION systems have arrived and are viable. Companies including Return-Path, Habeas, Goodmail, and others have evolved considerably and can provide real data to both senders and receivers of email. In addition, some of these providers along with major ISPs are receiving data as well as sharing their reputation data across other providers in exchange for receiving valuable reputation data in return. And the number of “feedback loops” (I should have patented/copyrighted that term, damn!) has grown dramatically and are now available from upwards of a dozen ISPs instead of just AOL and beta testing from Yahoo and Hotmail.

Its great to see an industry coming together and building the necessary tools and standards to make real progress in solving real problems. Very cool :-)

Windows Vista is out in the wild and some of my clients are starting to see Word, Excel and Powerpoint documents which the older versions of MSFT Office can not open. These documents have extensions which are similar to the current extensions but have a trailing X. For example, Word used to have a .DOC extension. The new extension is .DOCX. Powerpoint and Excel have similar changes to their extensions.

There is a patch available for Windows MSFT Office users here:

It works with these versions of MSFT Office applications:

Microsoft Word 2000 with Service Pack 3, Microsoft Excel 2000 with Service Pack 3, and Microsoft PowerPoint 2000 with Service Pack 3
Microsoft Word 2002 with Service Pack 3, Microsoft Excel 2002 with Service Pack 3, and Microsoft PowerPoint 2002 with Service Pack 3
Microsoft Office Word 2003 with at least Service Pack 1, Microsoft Office Excel 2003 with at least Service Pack 1, and Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2003 with at least Service Pack 1
Microsoft Office Word Viewer 2003
Microsoft Office Excel Viewer 2003
Microsoft Office PowerPoint Viewer 2003

There is no patch available for Mac OS X versions of MSFT Office.
- The best bet is to use a patched version of MSFT Office on Windows via Parallels or Bootcamp until the new Mac OS X version of Office arrives in the second half of 2007 (if it doesn’t slip). Or you can have the person who sent you the file try and SAVE AS an older version that your version of Office can open.

Don’t you hate the fact that the Mac defaults to grabbing screen shots to PNG format? I know I do as I want to drop them into emails more often than not and I can’t rely on the recipient (on Windoze) being able to see them. I used to use a little utility called Drop JPEG which would quickly convert the PNG into JPG for me. But I found a better way.

Evidently the screen grab utility in Mac OS X can grab screenshots in just about any format including TIFF and PDF and others. But to change the default, you have to change a parameter in the PRAM (I think). A nice little program, which can do this (and many other things as well!) is called ONYX.

Just download it and fire it up. Enter your admin password. Then hit cancel on the SMART drive scanning stuff (unless you want to do that). Click on the PARAMETERS icon and under GENERAL you should see “Format Screen Capture”. Pick JPEG and viola!

I discovered a great little program called FREENAS. Basically it is code which turns “PC Hardware” into a Network Attached Server (NAS). The software is free, hence the name.

http://www.freenas.org/

I took an old eMachine PC I had in the basement (466 Mhz, 500MB RAM), added two 500GB IDE drives ($150 each), a gig-e network card ($20) and now I have a 1 TB network server that can easily do 10MB/s.

If the CPU were a bit faster in the 1-2 GHz range, the unit will do 20-30MB/s over the gig-e network (I tested it with a newer machine that I had, for fun).

FreeNAS provides:

- Root login/SSH (the OS is FreeBSD)
- Good logging of all events/Remote Logging
- RSYNC for backups
- AFP, SMB, FTP, NFS, and HTTP access to your files
- A very polished web UI for managing things

Install was completely simple…no unix skills required! Just download the CD image, burn the install CD and follow the install process (boot with the CD, install the basic OS, reboot). Done. Then configure your drives and networking most of which is straight forward or automagic.

There are some things you don’t get (yet)….a big hole in my opinion is the lack of any real user/group/permissions control. Not a big deal for me as I am just using it as a central media server for music/video/photo stuff.

I can see a lot of uses for the set-up. One idea is to use it as a simple RSYNC backup server for a professional NAS (like one of the Infrant boxes).

Anyway, thought you all might like to know about this. A fun afternoon project which is being used everyday at my house now.

I found this on lifehacker the other day. Basically by combining a couple of Tbird plugins, you can start seeing your gcal in Thunderbird. Works on my Mac just peachy. Should work for PC people too. Instructions here:

Life Hacker Article on Thunderbird and Gcal Calendar

Now I could already see my google calendar within iCal on my mac, but this set-up is better because you can actually change and add events through Thunderbird as opposed to iCal which was strictly READ ONLY (unless you went through some real hacks and additional programs).